At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

July 31, 2014

Say what you will about
keeping electronic notes, datebooks and schedules – there is still something
highly enjoyable about tracking the days of the year in physical form, actually
tearing off a calendar page to mark the passing of the day, the week, the
month. And there is still something delightful about having those pages filled
with some of the best comics being drawn by cartoonists today – ones that will
bring you a different laugh or sigh of wry amusement day after day. Yes, you
can get cartoons electronically (even if they were not created for electronic
media); and yes, you can look at the small screen of a cell phone or the
somewhat larger one of a tablet or the even bigger one of a computer to see
comic panels. But there remains something unsatisfying, for many people if not
for everyone, about living all of one’s
life electronically, including the tracking of each day of it. And so there are
lots of excellent Andrews McMeel calendars based on top cartoonists’ work
available each year to help fans of the strips mark the year to come. And they
are always welcome – they were this year and will be again in 2015.

Dilbert is beyond being a classic and has become an integral part
of society for everyone who works in a soulless, faceless major corporation,
and for plenty of people who don’t work in such a place and are quite sure they
wouldn’t enjoy themselves if they did. The cover of Scott Adams’ 2015 Dilbert calendar says it all: it
features the Pointy-Haired Boss (PHB) asking a hapless employee, “Did you get
the E-mail I texted you?” Dilbert, mouthless as always and his tie curled up as
usual, sits next to the boss, marveling at this latest instance of
cluelessness. And it is scarcely the only
such instance, as this calendar’s pages show again and again. In one, Dilbert explains
that after computers learn to program themselves, machine intelligence will
grow so quickly that civilization will likely be destroyed, so humans can now
decide whether to live an unhealthy lifestyle or engage in techno-terrorism;
the boss blandly selects Option A. Dilbert tries Internet dating and has to
choose between a woman addicted to Facebook and another addicted to
prescription pain medicines – a tie, Dogbert points out, but Dilbert notes that
only one of the two will likely make eye contact. The company CEO tries his
hand at creating a new brand and comes up with “herthlokel.” The PHB declines
to motivate Dilbert, saying that “a monkey could do your assignment while
eating a banana.” Dogbert starts “a pump-and-dump newsletter for thinly traded
stocks,” carefully arranging things so “my bad stock picks can be attributed to
honest mistakes.” The company hires an intern’s intern, who must wear a leather
hood at meetings. And so on, so forth and so it goes. With a year of this in
store, any vestige of interest that Dilbert
fans might have in finding a job at a big company will soon decide he or she
would be better off on the proverbial desert island.

And that is just where two
characters find themselves on the cover of the 2015 calendar based on Wiley
Miller’s Non Sequitur, with a man on
one tiny island sending a note in a bottle to the man on the next-door tiny
island, with a note in the bottle saying, “You have a friend request.”
Characters do not always follow logic in Dilbert,
or follow it only to extremes, but Non
Sequitur actually means “it does
not follow,” and although the title refers to the fact that one day’s work
usually has nothing to do with that of the day before or after, it also shows
just how illogical (or too precisely logical) life can be. A woman visits a
store looking for an old-fashioned greeting card for Valentine’s Day and finds
a rack labeled as being for “imaginary Internet fiancé.” Up above the clouds, God looks with puzzlement at an Oscar
statuette, wondering “if they gave it to me just so I won’t smite them.” A graveyard
labeled “Testosterone Acres” includes a headstone inscribed, “Let me show you a
faster way to do that.” Another cemetery contains the “tomb of the unknown
celebrity,” who was “always sober, stayed faithful, obeyed the law.” A crowd of
cars is seen by the side of a road in the desert, next to a sign reading, “Last
Chance to Tweet: no reception for next 250 miles.” Wiley’s characteristically
befuddled, feckless non-repeating characters are interwoven in this calendar
with a few that are recurring, notably
little Danae of the dark personality, who (among other things) creates a “shut
up and mind your own business zone” that quickly provides her with “a new crop
of devoted minions.” And there is Danae’s brightly optimistic compatriot, the
pygmy Clydesdale, Lucy, who takes Danae to a place where there is no cell or
Internet service and tells her to “sit, relax and just be,” a notion that Danae
finds particularly appealing when Lucy points out that in nature, you can go to
the bathroom anywhere you want. Plenty of other characters, recurring and
non-recurring, make Non Sequitur a
delight and surprise day after day – a sure way to brighten the year to come.

To make your days not only
bright but also strange, consider Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater in calendar form for 2015. Here too the panels
do not follow from one day to the next – and for that matter, not even the
species of characters can be predicted. In one panel, Death applies for a
newspaper job and is told he has an impressive résumé based on the
obituaries. Spongebob’s mother warns him to stop wringing himself out in his
bed. A knife-wielding cookie cutter demands that two chocolate-chip victims
“hand over the dough.” An airline passenger gets a row to himself by coughing
constantly while making sure people in the aisle see the books he has brought
along about overcoming tuberculosis and living with leprosy. A mother and
father sausage worry about their kids being “spoiled brats.” A praying mantis
warns the young mantis taking his daughter out to have her back before midnight
and to be sure his head is still attached. A dog husband compliments his wife
on her disgusting breath, which she attributes to her new “hot garbage scented”
mouthwash. Wonder Woman tries unsuccessfully to describe her invisible jet to a
policeman after the plane is stolen. A subway rider encounters “the likeness
monster,” who closely resembles the man’s father. Elmer Fudd reads the
instructions on a box of “bwownies.” Dogs go shopping at Victerrier’s Secret,
Foot Licker, Puppy Gap and other canine mall stores. A pirate dentist tells
patients to say “arrrrr.” And so on and so forth all year – a collection of
puns, pop culture, talking animals, and lots of absurd characters doing absurd
things. And no actual argyles were harmed in the making of this particular
sweater.

Speaking of harm, doctors
and other medical professionals are supposed to be sure not to do any, but for
anyone who finds that an iffy proposition – or simply thinks laughter may be
better medicine than most prescription drugs – Jonny Hawkins’ Medical Cartoon-a-Day may be just the
thing to lift spirits throughout 2015. Hawkins produces old-fashioned
black-and-white cartoons of the type that used to appear in magazines and still
show up in some print publications, such as The
New Yorker. One shows medics – or are they mechanics? – carrying a man on a
stretcher to a body shop. Another offers an I chart – that is, a optometrist’s chart
containing only the letter I. Elsewhere, surgical students are forced to learn
from the “Operation” game because of funding cutbacks; a doctor tells a patient
that “your HMO will pay for a pound of cure, but not an ounce of prevention”;
and another tells a man, “We’re not even sure how many syllables there are for
what you have.” A man who passes out during a Star Wars marathon is diagnosed with “a near-Darth experience.” Patients
in a crowded waiting room are told the “naturalist healer” is giving them plenty
of time to heal naturally. A hot-dog cart offers “all-natural health supplements”
with the frankfurters. And then there’s the man who is in counseling for his
addiction to counseling. The simple line drawings are mildly amusing but are not
the main point here – it is the one-line insights into (and critiques of)
modern medicine that will keep you chuckling throughout the year. Or keep your
doctor chuckling – this is one of those calendars that can provide a daily dose
of gentle humor to the very people at whose expense it generates laughs.

The way to a young reader’s
literary heart – and head, for that matter – may lie in words, pictures or a
combination. The combined approach is the most popular, implemented in a wide
variety of ways. The series that Andrews McMeel calls “AMP! Comics for Kids”
takes excerpts from current and older strips and binds them in easy-to-handle
224-page paperbacks designed not for narrative continuity (which they lack) but
for easy reading and immediate appeal to younger readers. Presumably these
books will become a gateway to larger collections of the same strips – or to
other comics and other visually striking offerings. Choosing strips for a
Stephan Pastis collection of this type is by no means easy, though. Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine is a dark strip
filled with multi-day continuity that is broken up by extended and generally
awful puns that are a highlight because
they are so terrible (and that inevitably lead Pastis, who appears as a
character in his own strip, to be roundly condemned and physically attacked by
the other characters). Because this strip is filled with characters being killed,
drinking beer, and committing all sorts of mayhem, it scarcely seems suitable
for the young-reader treatment. But The
Croc Ate My Homework turns out to be just fine. True, there is a strip in
which the inept crocodiles, trying for the umpteenth time to trap and eat their
neighbor, Zebra, grind up one of their own in a wood chipper, and another in
which one of the crocs devours one of Santa’s elves. But by the standards of
this strip, this sort of violence (which always happens off-screen or, rather, out
of panel) is quite mild. A sequence in which a young crocodile has a fling with
a young zebra, refusing to see her as prey, fits well here, as do strips in
which one of the crocs offers his son bedtime stories and nursery rhymes –
suitably rewritten from a predator’s point of view. And then there is the strip
in which the croc’s conscience appears to warn him against killing other
creatures – so the croc makes a snack of the conscience itself. The Croc Ate My Homework is
croc-centered (although no homework appears to have been eaten in its
creation), but the book also features plenty of appearances by other Pearls Before Swine regulars, including
Rat, Pig and Goat. It does not give the full (and sometimes bitter) flavor of
the strip, but as an introduction to Pastis’ oddities, it serves quite well.

Pastis has written about the
extent to which he owes his success in cartooning to Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, not only because of the influence
of the Peanuts strips themselves but
also because of Pastis having actually met Schulz (1922-2000) and talked with
him about comics. Peanuts was a
considerably darker strip than many adults remember when thinking back on their
own experience of it – not as dark as Pastis’, certainly, but packed with
considerable emotional negativism and disappointment. It also had plenty of
grown-up language (it originated as a strip in which little kids said grown-up
things) and a wide variety of complex themes, including a religious one (which
led to a book by Robert Short called The
Gospel According to Peanuts). Many of these themes are evident in Pow! – which features on its cover one
of the classic panels in which baseball pitcher Charlie Brown is partially
undressed by the force of a line drive hit right back at him. Like his
inevitable failure to kick a football held by Lucy, Charlie Brown’s feckless
attempts to pitch well and manage his team of misfits provided a sports-based
foundation for the put-upon protagonist to fail again and again in
ever-more-creative and ever-more-disappointing ways. Just how much failure
there was in the baseball context is quite clear in Pow! The entire book is made up of baseball-themed sequences from Peanuts, to the point of repetitiveness
– which the stories did not have when Schulz was alive, since he spaced them
out over months and years. The dates of the panels are not given in this
reprint, which is understandable in terms of not wanting the comics to seem old
to the young readers for whom the book is designed. There are some unintended consequences
of the decision, though: references to cartoonist Willard Mullin, mid-1960s baseball
commissioner William Eckert, conductor Leonard Bernstein and pitcher Sandy
Koufax will make no sense whatsoever to today’s young readers. Neither will the
sequence in which Charlie Brown and Linus place a newspaper want ad to try to
find Charlie Brown a new team to manage. But in general, annotations are not
necessary for this book – in which, time after time, Charlie Brown tries his
very best while, time after time, events and his own wishy-washy personality
conspire against him. Schulz’ art remains as intriguing and effective as ever
here, and so does his writing: “How can I run a baseball team and solve moral
issues at the same time?” And: “Just what I’ve always been afraid of: my team
has built up an immunity to losing!” Like Charlie Brown himself, Peanuts just keeps coming back again and
again, and hopefully young readers will continue looking for these classic
strips after they get started with Pow!

As good as Schulz’ writing
was, and as Pastis’ writing is, comic-strip collections inevitably put the
focus on visual impact when trying to attract younger readers. Dan Gutman’s My Weird School series and its spinoffs
and successors, in contrast, focus primarily on writing, even though the Jim
Paillot illustrations are important to the books’ overall effect. The fact that
these books read and look like clones of each other gives them a (+++) rating;
but the reality is that any book’s resemblance to any other is, in this case,
purely intentional. Gutman wants kids to know exactly what they will be getting
before they ever get past a book’s cover. So it will be obvious from the get-go
that My Weirder School #11: Miss Klute Is
a Hoot! will feature A.J. narrating a story about yet another oddball,
offbeat occurrence in school. This time the focus is a dog called Miss Klute,
who shows up at reading time to help encourage the kids to read out loud. This
approach works so well that even reluctant readers (who, by the way, are the
target audience for Gutman’s books) want to do more reading to Miss Klute, and
ask to do so with enthusiasm: “If you ever want something really badly, just
say ‘please’ over and over again to a grown-up. That’s the first rule of being
a kid.” To be sure, there turn out to be some unexpected complications
involving Miss Klute, but before things get too
serious, everything is nicely resolved. Of course. And so it also goes in My Weird School Special: Back to School,
Weird Kids Rule! The narrator here is Andrea – her first time narrating, as
a matter of fact – and she sprinkles reasons she loves school throughout the
book. The book features the kids going to a camp that, instead of being a
summertime alternative to school, is a camp to help them get ready to go back
to school; they react pretty much as expected (except that, remember, narrator
Andrea loves school and everything resembling it). Most of the fun here
actually comes from having Andrea tell the story: she not only creates a list
of things she loves about school but also decides that she loves list-making so
much that she should make a list of her favorite lists – and does. Like
Gutman’s other Weird School books,
this one is easy to read, lightly plotted and filled with silly humor as well
as amusing illustrations. With any luck, these two new Gutman books will help
kids get into the right frame of mind for their real and hopefully not too
weird school days.

The I Can Read! series from HarperCollins is distinguished not only by its
five levels of writing for differently advanced young readers but also by its
use of characters that tie into longer, more-complex books outside the series
itself. Kids who learn reading from simple adventures of Pinkalicious or Little
Critter, for example, will have a wealth of other books to choose from when
they move beyond the series itself and are ready to explore reading on their
own. Not all the characters in the I Can
Read! series are necessarily well-known, and some are certainly more
important in modern children’s literature than others – but what makes the
series work so well is the way any and all the characters are used in stories
that intrigue kids at all reading levels and help them move into more-complex
tales as their reading ability grows.

The series starts at the My First level, identified as “ideal for
sharing with emergent readers” – that is, books at this level are intended to
be read with a young child to help introduce him or her to reading that will
eventually be something he or she can do alone. Huff and Puff and the New Train is an example: Huff is an engine
and Puff is a caboose, and together they make trains go. But a new, sleek train
shows up and is much faster than the old-fashioned friends.The trains have a race – and in unsurprising
tortoise-and-hare fashion, the new train is so far ahead that it stops to rest,
which lets Huff and Puff pass by and win. The language is very simple and
presented in very large print: “The two trains raced uphill and down,/ in the
country, in the town.” And the colors and settings are pleasant and enjoyable
for pre-readers and the youngest readers: the book is officially intended for
ages 4-8, but is more likely to attract kids in the 3-6 age range.

Also designed for ages 4-8,
and more reasonably targeted there, Level 1 books offer “simple sentences for
eager new readers” – an example being Diary
of a Worm: Nat the Gnat. The original Diary
of a Worm, which young readers may seek out after they become more adept
with books, is by Doreen Cronin and Harry Bliss; but as usual in this series
for the youngest readers, the Nat the
Gnat entry is an adaptation based on the original book, not a work by
Cronin and Bliss themselves. The approach and characterization remain true,
though, in a story – slightly more complex than those in the My First level – that has Worm allowed
to take care of the class pet, Nat the Gnat, until Worm accidentally leaves the
cage open. Not knowing what to do, Worm has to decide whether or not to tell everyone
what happened. His decision is to catch another gnat – with the help of his
friend Spider – but even then, he feels bad and eventually does tell the class
that he lost Nat. Telling the truth helps everything work out when it is
discovered that Nat is not lost after all – a simple moral, no more overstated
than the tortoise-and-hare one in the Huff and Puff book, with the language
here slightly more complex: “This morning, I brought Nat a nice wet leaf. I
opened his tank to put in the leaf. Then I closed it and went out for recess.”

The writing becomes still
more complex in Level 2 books, which offer “high-interest stories for
developing readers.” These too are for ages 4-8; with the natural
differentiation of reading skills, that age range continues to make sense –
earlier readers will be done with them by about age six, but some kids may not
even start at this level until that age. In any case, there are many, many
characters at this level from whom to choose, some quite well-known and others
less so. Jeff Brown’s Flat Stanley, for example, is at the center of Show-and-Tell, Flat Stanley! – although,
as usual in this reading series, the book is based on Brown’s work but not
created by him. Stanley’s little brother, Arthur, takes Stanley to school for
show-and-tell, where the teacher, Miss Plum, has something of her own to show
the class: an engagement ring. In a series of misadventures, the ring ends up
on the head of another show-and-tell offering, a mouse, and Stanley alone can
get into the ceiling crack where the frightened mouse has gone to hide. The
mistakes and heroics happen quickly and amusingly; kids who already know Flat
Stanley – perhaps through an older sibling – will enjoy this book and look
forward to reading more about the flattened-by-a-blackboard boy.

Speaking of mouse matters, Riff Raff the Mouse Pirate commands a
crew consisting of Cheddar, Munster, Swiss, Colby, Blue and Brie on a treasure
quest complicated by the fact that the map they are using is partially torn. Riff
Raff promises cheese to the first mouse pirate who spots the right street – all
they know is that its name starts with PLU. Several misspellings later, the
correct street is located and the treasure is found – and proves not to be what
the mice expected, although they are quite happy with it nevertheless. Riff
Raff’s story was created specifically for this reading series rather than spun
off from other books – but there is more of Riff Raff within this series for kids to enjoy. There are several Monster
School books by Dave Keane, too, such as The
Spooky Sleepover. These feature entirely nonthreatening monsters with eyes
on stalks, a single eye, 10 eyeballs, and various non-eye-related anatomical
features, such as the ability to change into a bat or werewolf, two heads – that
sort of thing. Keane carefully draws the kid monsters to look as much as
possible like ordinary children – such as Norm, who in The Spooky Sleepover is having his first-ever sleepover, which
happens to be at Monster School. Norm interacts with Gill (who has gills), Gary
(a ghost), Harry (a werewolf who eats two whole pizzas, plus the boxes they
come in), Miss Grunt (the zombie librarian), and other at the school. But Norm
cannot sleep – not because of the monstrousness around him but because he does
not have his usual sleeping environment. So the monsters help Norm out – for
instance, Hilda the witch turns her salamander into a cat to keep Norm company
– and everything ends happily. The gentle lesson here, that everyone worries on
his or her first sleepover, is nicely meshed with the unusual setting.

Some Level 2 books draw on
characters originally created for purposes having little to do with learning to
read – video games and comics, for example. Kids who enjoy the Plants vs. Zombies game and comics featuring
Batman can easily find Level 2 books that they will like, such as Save Your Brains! and Batman Versus the Riddler. The first of
these is essentially an introduction to the silliness of a world where
brain-craving but slow and ridiculous-looking zombies are easy to fight off by
using various helpful, anthropomorphic plants, such as potato mines, two-fisted
Bonk Choy and (for Pirate Zombies) Snapdragons. The second is a typical story
in which a supposedly smart bad guy cannot outwit Batman (helped in this case
by Batgirl) – and the villain ends up foiled by his own miscalculation, leaving
the Bat duo (drawn in contemporary hyper-craggy style) triumphant. These books
are not as carefully designed to advance kids’ reading ability as are many of
the other I Can Read! books, and
therefore get (+++) ratings. And neither of these books will appeal to early
readers who are not already involved in their subject matter. But those who are interested in the video-game or
comic-book background of these books may be encouraged to read more-traditional
books by seeing the characters they know and like in this context. And that is
ultimately what all the I Can Read!
books are after, with whatever characters they contain: getting kids interested
in reading in a systematic way that is progressive through multiple stages of
difficulty.

The Never Girls #7: A Pinch of
Magic. By Kiki Thorpe. Illustrated by Jana Christy. Random House. $5.99.

Families are the ties that
bind preteens in a great many novels for ages 7-12, although “family” is differently
defined in various books – sometimes even involving characters who are not
related to each other but who feel like family members (generally idealized
ones). Fantasy adventures frequently involve the preteen family member(s)
rescuing parents, lending grounding of a sort to stories that are otherwise
fairly far out – such as Oliver and the
Seawigs. This is an amusing, amply illustrated tale in which Oliver and his
explorer parents have an adventure that revolves around Oliver rescuing his mom
and dad from a living island that is using them, encased in bubbles, as
decoration. Oliver’s folks are to become part of the “seawig” contest in the
Hallowed Shallows, where the moving islands all get together to decide who has
the best seawig and therefore deserves to, in effect, lead all the rest. The
fact that this makes not a lick of sense is wholly irrelevant: Philip Reeve’s
book is created entirely for fun, and Sarah McIntyre’s two-color illustrations
dial the amusement up a notch. Of course, Oliver will need help to rescue his
folks, so he turns to a mermaid named Iris who does not fit in with the other
mermaids because she is on the plump rather than svelte side, has a
much-less-than-mellifluous voice, and is quite nearsighted. Also helping Oliver
out are some jumbo-sized sea monkeys and Mr. Culpeper, a self-described
Wandering Albatross, who is able to talk – which seems unlikely, Oliver points
out, until Mr. Culpeper explains that parrots can talk (which, again, makes no
logical sense, but so what?). On the bad-guy side are the Thurlstone – that’s
the bad island holding Oliver’s parents captive – and a boy named Stacey de
Lacey, who is upset that his first name sounds like a girl’s and has therefore
turned to rather undifferentiated evil. The mixed-up mishmash of these
characters provides a roller-coaster ride for readers, and includes some ideas
that go beyond chuckles into genuine amusement – such as the Sarcastic Sea,
which is. Reeve and McIntyre call this book “a not-so-impossible tale” and are
certainly planning more of the same in the future. One hopes.

The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher, in contrast, is – except
for one thing – an entirely ordinary book about growing up and facing everyday
issues involving school, homework, friends, neighbors, animals, holidays and so
forth. It is intended to be amusing, too, although the hilarity in Dana Alison
Levy’s debut novel is far more studied (and ultimately less funny) than in
Reeve and McIntyre’s work. This is the story of four boys, one aged 12, two
aged 10 and one aged six, and their various interests and preoccupations, which
range from soccer and books to an invisible cheetah. The book’s cover shows two
Caucasian and two African-American boys, but mixed and blended families are
nothing particularly new in preteen books anymore; in fact, authors often bend
over backwards (to the point of extreme obviousness) to create racially and
ethnically balanced character groups. What is
out of the ordinary here, and what turns this into a “cause” book, is the
family parents: Dad and Papa. Levy’s point is quite clearly to show that
families headed by two men are every bit as usual, typical, ordinary and worthy
of acceptance as any other kind of family. Indeed, the ordinariness of the
Fletcher boys’ adventures seems intended to make the point that their family is
just like every other one. That this is transparently not the case is what
makes this (+++) novel a subtle advocacy book rather than a straightforward
coming-of-age tale. Context matters, and Levy’s point is that once you get past
the issue of who the Fletcher parents are, what happens with them and their
kids (misunderstandings, discipline issues, worries, concerns, celebrations) is
just like what happens with other families. Parents in families headed by a man
and woman, or a single mom or dad, will need to think about Levy’s advocacy
before deciding whether this book will work for their kids. Sam, Jax, Eli and
Frog (real name: Jeremiah) are cardboard characters, their individuation
minimal and patterned on that of characters in many other books for this age
group. Their adventures and misadventures (including an amusing one involving a
skunk) will be quite familiar to parents and young readers alike. But the
context within which those adventures occur is one that will invite
considerable discussion in at least some families – and that, more than the
book’s formulaic plot, seems to be what most interests Levy.

Gary Paulsen’s short (+++)
books about Kevin Spencer are somewhat over-plotted and on the obvious side,
but Kevin does have real personality, and Family
Ties, the fifth book about him and those around him, does as good a job of
bringing that personality out as did the previous four: Liar, Liar; Flat Broke; Crush; and Vote. Family drama is front-and-center throughout the latest book,
as Kevin decides to use his uncle’s planned wedding – which quickly turns out
to be one of two planned weddings –
to bring his dysfunctional family together and impress his too-good-to-be-true
girlfriend, Tina. Add in a mismatch of affection between Kevin’s cat, Teddy,
and Uncle Will’s huge and bladder-challenged dog, Athena, and you have all the
ingredients for a romp. But wait – there’s more; there is always more in these
books, which accounts for their frantic pace and somewhat overdone
hyperactivity. The “more” here is the family-focused school project that Kevin
is working on with classmate Katie Knowles while he is also trying to juggle
two weddings and an increasing number of oddball relatives oozing out of the
figurative woodwork. The project has Kevin and Katie as make-believe husband
and wife, dealing with joblessness, financial trouble and a baby girl named
Dumpster Assassin. Kevin’s hopes that he will excel at pretend-marriage and
thereby prepare Tina for eventual not-pretend marriage go awry, of course, and
in fact pretty much everything goes
awry, which is the story arc of all the Kevin Spacey books. Paulsen, who is
nothing if not an expert at untangling the skeins that he tangles in the first
place, eventually knits things up as neatly as usual, and Kevin aptly
concludes, “I always knew that a guy like me had to get one of his big ideas
right eventually. I just needed a whole lot of help from people who care about
me.” And that, of course, is what family, and Family Ties, are all about.

The seventh Never Girls book continues the
adventures of four human girls – Gabby, Kate, Lainey and Mia – who are able to
travel between the human town of Pixie Hollow and the fairies’ Never Land.
Their portal is a mere broken fence slat; their adventures are equally mundane
in most respects. In A Pinch of Magic,
the focus is mainly on Mia – different books give different girls the limelight
– and the bake sale for which she is preparing. Mia enlists the help of Dulcie,
a fairy with talent for baking little (of course, little) cakes. But as in
other books of this series, one must not rely solely, or too much, on magic:
Mia must finish the cakes on her own after Dulcie returns to Never Land. But
Mia does not have baking talent, which is why Dulcie has been helping her in
the first place. What to do? This sort of minimalist worry is typical of these
easy (+++) chapter books, in which the girl protagonists invariably discover
that they are more self-sufficient and talented than they think they are, and
can use a little magical help (who couldn’t?) but do not really need it. Thus, Kiki Thorpe makes sure
that after all the misunderstandings and humorous occurrences (such as Dulcie
being temporarily trapped in a grocery-store freezer and inadvertently using
her dress to butter a saucepan), Mia herself makes her baked creations – which
she labels “Fairy Cakes” – a big success, raising plenty of money to help a
neighborhood family recover after a house fire. Fans of this series, which
extends the Disney version of Never Land from Peter Pan, will enjoy A Pinch
of Magic as much as any of the other Never
Girls books, and will find themselves enjoying the notion that even humans
and fairies can become members of the same family, more or less – you just have
to believe it can happen.

The exceptionally
interesting CPO Bruckner cycle conducted by Mario Venzago reaches its
penultimate release with Venzago’s reading of Symphony No. 8 – for which, once
again, he has made a superb choice of orchestra. One of the main distinguishing
characteristics of this Bruckner sequence is the conductor’s use of different
ensembles for different symphonies, his intention being to highlight the ways
in which the sound of each symphony is distinct by performing it with an
orchestra whose own sound elicits what Venzago believes Bruckner intended. This
is more than an academic exercise: Bruckner’s symphonies too often come across
as massive gouts of sonic grandeur throughout, but Venzago shows persuasively
that they have clarity and even delicacy that is all too frequently unobserved
or unnoticed. So Venzago used the Tapiola Sinfonietta for Nos. 0 and 1; the
Northern Sinfonia for No. 2; the Berner Symphonieorchester for Nos. 3, 6 and 9;
the Sinfonieorchester Basel for Nos. 4 and 7; and now the Konzerthausorchester
Berlin (known from its founding in 1952 until 2006 as the Berlin Symphony
Orchestra) for the massive and highly complex No. 8. This is an inspired
choice: the orchestra has richness in the strings, a burnished brass section
and woodwinds that are quite able to hold their own amid the other sections. As
usual nowadays, Venzago performs the 1890 version of this symphony, which is
considerably different from its original 1887 version (which Georg Tintner
recorded for Naxos back in 1996 and Franz Welser-Möst has conducted more recently, but which remains very rarely
heard in concert or on disc). The huge scope of the work and Bruckner’s very
carefully designed relationships among the movements produce a symphony that is
at once tightly knit and broadly expansive. Venzago not only understands this
intellectually – he is a very thoughtful conductor – but also knows how to
bring out both the work’s forward-looking design and its tremendous emotional
impact. The Konzerthausorchester Berlin has a great deal to do with this,
playing with sumptuousness, firm rhythmic control and sectional balance so good
that it is always possible to follow the complexities of Bruckner’s thematic
groups and rhythm changes and to feel their impact – as, for instance, in the
choice of 2/4 time for the trio of the third movement rather than the much more
typical 3/4. This is above all a dramatic symphony, its emotional sweep
capturing listeners at the start and continuing through a finale that eventually
recalls themes from all four movements. Venzago carefully builds sections
within the movements, the entire movements, and the overall symphony with great
care and skill, and the result is a thrilling and highly moving performance
featuring first-rank orchestral sound that beautifully matches the composer’s
emotive qualities. Only the Symphony No. 5 remains to be released in Venzago’s
Bruckner cycle – an odd choice for the final building block, but one that, on
the basis of all he has done so far, Venzago is likely to prove a
well-considered and well-thought-out one.

Another cycle on CPO is just
beginning, and this one too has fascinating elements. It will offer the
complete works for violin and orchestra by the notoriously prickly and
difficult Max Bruch, who for most listeners is a one-work composer – known
solely for his violin concerto. But Bruch wrote three violin concertos, and the decision to launch this series by
featuring No. 2 is a bold and highly interesting one. Bruch was a marvelous
tunesmith, spinning long-line slow movements so gorgeous melodically and so
balanced in orchestration that it is perfectly possible to be swept away by
their beauty to such an extent as to be disappointed by the frequently more
workmanlike faster movements that succeed or surround them. Antje Weithaas
clearly sees and accepts Bruch as a poet; but at the same time, she
acknowledges the structural skill he brings to his works even in their
less-inspired elements. The Violin Concerto No. 2 comes across as something of
a parallel to Schumann’s Piano Concerto: the long first movement can stand on
its own as a fantasy, making it difficult to integrate the second and third
movements in such a way as to produce a convincing whole. Weithaas does a
first-rate job of this: the opening movement sings, swoons and explores with
transcendent beauty, and the second and third – although they are not its equal
– come across as more than mere appendages. This is a highly satisfying
performance of the concerto, immensely helped by the elegant accompaniment by
the NDR Radiophilharmonie under Hermann Bäumer. The Scottish
Fantasy, one of the few works beyond the first violin concerto for which
Bruch is at least somewhat known, also sounds splendid here, its folkloric
elements clearly at the service of a concerto-worthy violin part that stands
above the orchestra’s while still being integrated into the ensemble. By turns
emotionally stirring, graceful and rhythmically bouncy, the Scottish Fantasy here sounds like a
folk-song-based suite for violin and orchestra in which both soloist and
conductor show a high level of sensitivity to the music’s nuances. Also here,
and very welcome, is the Adagio
appassionato, Op. 57, which Bruch originally intended as the first movement
of what would have become his fourth violin concerto. As so often in Bruch, the
melodies are stirring and passionate, and the piece emerges as an extended
fantasy – much as the opening of the second concerto does, but in this case
without added movements to complement the work or distract from it. This is an
excellent first volume in what promises to be a thoroughly delightful exploration
of the music of a man whose personality was so difficult that it infected many
people’s regard for his work. Nearly a century after Bruch’s death in 1920, it
is now becoming possible to evaluate his music without needing to know about,
or pay attention to, its biographical surroundings.

It is also high time for a
reconsideration of the music of Zdeněk
Fibich (1850-1900), who has lain so deeply in the shadows of Dvořák and Smetana that he has been all
but invisible. The third volume in a very fine Naxos cycle featuring the Czech
National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marek Štilec shows Fibich to particularly good advantage in five tone
poems composed around the same time as Smetana’s Má Vlast and a decade or more before the ones Dvořák wrote based on ballads by Karel
Erben. It is very easy to hear the many folklike elements of Fibich’s music in
these pieces, and to hear some striking cadential similarities with the work of
Smetana (in particular). The two Shakespeare-based tone poems, Othello and The Tempest, are particularly effective encapsulations of the
emotional core of those plays, with tone-painting that is very well-wrought if,
on the whole, rather straightforward. Záboj,
Slavoj and Luděk and Toman and the
Wood Nymph trace their origin to Czech folk tales, and both build
effectively and recount their stories with appropriate measures of (in the
first case) grandeur and (in the second) lovesickness. And Spring is fascinating because of what it is not: it does not simply portray the season as a bright emergence
from winter, but shows it to be far more variegated than seasonal tone-painting
usually does. It is probably inevitable to compare Fibich with Dvořák and Smetana, noting that he does
not have the melodic gifts of the former or the storytelling drama of the
latter. But while this is true, it is also unfair: Dvořák lived to be 62 and did much of his most-popular work in his
50s, while Smetana lived to age 60 and finished Má Vlast when he was 55. Fibich died before his 50th
birthday, and much of his work as heard in the first three volumes of this
series is early: all the tone poems in this volume were written when he was in
his 20s or 30s. So while it may be true that Fibich lacked some of the inborn
gifts of Dvořák and Smetana, it
may also be true that he never had the chance to develop fully the talent that
he undeniably possessed. The tone poems heard here, all of them very
well-orchestrated and played with considerable élan, continue to show what this
series’ first two volumes did: that Fibich is most certainly deserving of the
rediscovery that he is now beginning to receive.

Anyone interested in hearing an approach to
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis that has
the sort of operatic intensity more usually heard in Verdi’s Requiem will welcome the Georg Solti
performance from 1982 recorded live in London and released on the London Philharmonic
Orchestra’s own label. The playing and singing here are strong and virtuosic,
with the four soloists bringing tremendous intensity and very fine projection
to their roles, and with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus offering outstanding and
very clear vocal delivery. The palpable intensity of this reading is sustained
throughout: this is a recording that never flags. At the same time, though, it
never contemplates. Beethoven’s own religious ideas and ideals were unsettled
and sometimes changing, and he seems to have had an overall humanistic bent
grafted onto an essentially Catholic orientation. But there is no doubt that he
intended the Missa Solemnis to offer
the highest possible level of holiness in sound and devotional substance, and
that is what is missing here. Certainly there is considerable drama in
Beethoven’s setting of the Mass, but there is not only drama. Solti leaves the impression that the Missa Solemnis was conceived, first and
foremost, as a dramatic work – a proposition that is arguable at best. He
captures the intensity of the music thrillingly, and elicits fine playing from
the orchestra to complement the excellent vocal elements; but after the
performance ends, one misses a sense of uplift, of something that transcends
the facile realm in which most opera dwells. This is a first-rate Missa Solemnis from its particular point
of view, but the viewpoint itself is inherently flawed in the way it minimizes
(if not trivializes) the sacred aspects of the music.

The seriousness is undoubted
on a new MSR Classics CD called A Thing
Most Wonderful, which offers music by Bach, Handel, Pergolesi, Purcell, César Franck, John Ireland, Charles
Villiers Stanford and others – 17 tracks in all, all of them heartfelt and
delivered devotionally by the St. Cecilia Choir of Girls from Christ Church,
Greenwich, Connecticut, conducted by Jamie Hitel. There are nine tracks
designated “Lent and Passiontide” and eight for Easter, with music of various
eras juxtaposed: Stanford’s A Song of
Hope is immediately followed by My
Song Is Love Unknown by Malcolm Archer (born 1952), for example, and Handel’s
If God Be For Us is succeeded by Lift Your Voice, Rejoicing, Mary by
Thomas Foster (born 1938). The varying styles of the vocal works make for a
somewhat uneasy mixture, despite the fluidity with which the chorus approaches
each piece; the fact that all the music has a sacred purpose unites the
recording but not the succession of works. Two of the pieces here were
commissioned by Hitel from Philip Moore (born 1943): Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing and Jubilate Deo (Psalm 100). Both fit well into the Easter segment of
the CD, but neither shows Moore to be a composer so skilled as to deserve two
entries here while Bach, Handel, Purcell and all the others receive one apiece.
This CD will be of most interest to listeners intrigued by hearing the
juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary church music, sung by an adept
and well-led girls’ choir.

Another MSR Classics release
features avowedly secular works by William Averitt (born 1948), whose three
cycles based on Langston Hughes’ poetry are gathered under the umbrella title The Deepness of the Blue – which is also
the title of the most-recent cycle itself, from 2012. The musical concept of
these cycles is an interesting one: all are for chorus and piano four hands,
scarcely a typical combination. The earliest, Afro-American Fragments, dates to 1991 and contains six songs; The Dream Keeper (2009) contains four;
and the title cycle includes five. Afro-American
Fragments is a stylistic mixture of jazz, ragtime and blues, arranged in
three short-long movement pairs. The
Dream Keeper, the most musically interesting of the three cycles, ranges from
chordal and other slow passages to fast-moving ones and contains a particularly
impressive setting of “As I Grew Older,” a song about how age suppresses
youthful dreams that features, at the end, a strong reaffirmation of creative
thinking, expectation and hope. The
Deepness of the Blue tries a little too hard for deep meaning and
profundity, its most impressive movement being the intense and strongly
syncopated “Drum,” which sounds quite different from the rest of the cycle.
Lovers of Hughes’ poetry will certainly enjoy hearing the many ways in which
Averitt sets it in these cycles, and these world première recordings are impressively sung throughout, with a
particularly nice solo turn by soprano Natalie Lassinger in “Song for Billie
Holliday” from Afro-American Fragments.
The appeal of the disc, though, is somewhat limited by the exclusive use of
poetry that, while involving enough in small doses, is neither sufficiently
varied nor sufficiently thoughtful to sustain Averitt’s level of attention and
intensity through nearly 50 minutes of music.

The intensity has both
secular and religious elements in Robert Aldridge’s Parables, a work from 2010 in which Aldridge and librettist
Herschel Garfein make yet another of the many recent very-well-meaning attempts
by artists to use the power of performance to build bridges among the primary
Abrahamic faiths. Using words from the Torah, New Testament and Koran, Garfein
attempts to show the many ways in which the religions have common roots and
common thoughts, with the secular intent of the work – abetted by Aldridge’s
sensitively varied music – being to counter the forces that make it seem that these
religions are and must be at war, both philosophically and physically. This is
a piece that works particularly well on DVD: the Naxos release is not merely a
visualization of a concert but a fully worked-through performance in which
choreography, lighting and costume design are just as important to the overall
impact as are the words and music. Stage director David Walsh and conductor
Kathy Saltzman Romey offer an operatically conceived oratorio that will surely
appeal to people who already believe that the major faiths can and should, even
must, appreciate each other. These are the sorts of people who have car bumper
stickers in which the word “coexist” is assembled from a Muslim crescent, a peace
symbol, an “e” bearing male and female symbols, the Jewish star, an “i” dotted
with the yin/yang symbol, an “s” with that same symbol in a larger size, and a
Christian cross. Very nice, very pretty, very simplistic, and ultimately very
useless – the bumper stickers, that is. There is far more substance than this
to Parables, but this is nevertheless
a work of supreme naïveté, a feel-good “can’t we all get along?” piece that
will appeal to people who are already predisposed to accept its undoubted,
underlying good intentions. It is hard to tell just how seriously Aldridge and
Garfield, who previously collaborated in Elmer
Gantry (2007) – a work in which the sacred and secular collide quite overtly
– expect the audience to take Parables,
and whether they hope that the work will in fact produce any increase in
tolerance whatsoever. In the real world, after all, even the Muslim crescent
does not mean the same thing to the 85% of Muslims who identify themselves as
Sunni as to the 15% who are Shiite; and the Jewish star cannot even be used in
international lifesaving operations in many countries in the Middle East. So
this Aldridge/Garfein “interfaith oratorio,” with its accessible music, its
clear verbal parallels among the three faiths from which it draws its text, and
its very fine singing, dancing and stage presentation, ultimately comes across
as yet another instance of preaching to the choir: it will surely please those
who already agree with its precepts, and just as surely have neither meaning
nor interest for those who do not.

July 24, 2014

Charley Harper’s A Partridge in a
Pear Tree. By Charley Harper. Pomegranate. $9.95.

One of the best-drawn of the
always engaging Bats books by Brian Lies, Bats
in the Band more than makes up in illustrative endearment for poetry that
does not scan quite as well as it does in Lies’ other books. The wonderfully
pictured bats, which are highly realistic and at the same time thoroughly
anthropomorphic in their postures and behavior, get together this time to make
music – all kinds of music. “And every last one of us knows where to go:/ a
summertime theater, after a show.” (That second line is a syllable short unless
“theater” has three; this is one of many rhythmic shortcomings here – a trifle
odd in a book about something as rhythm-driven as music!) The bats assemble in
the darkened theater and soon start putting together the concert to end all
concerts – using a riotous mixture of real instruments plus “things [made] up
out of straws, out of spoons.” Backstage chatter, with some bats hanging
upside-down while practicing as others stand and compare, umm, notes, makes it
clear that this will be a concert like no other: guitar, sitar, bagpipes, pocket
comb and serpent (an old wind instrument) are all shown in loving detail. The
bats perform both standing and hanging upside-down, too, with a chorus that
fills the entire page (top and bottom as well as side to side) and includes a
wide variety of bat species, from big-eared to flying fox. A classical string
quartet is shown playing upside-down, its instruments and music stands held
aloft by stage wires, its members’ feet clinging to matchsticks arrayed like
trapeze bars. A hilariously depicted “one-bat band” includes instruments from
the violin to the bass drum to the unnamable – no wonder just watching tires
the audience! There is country-and-western music, music for bat kiddies “who
can’t sit through a concert yet,” a bat wailing the blues on a page that is
entirely blue-tinted, and of course a rock band that has everybody (or
everybatty) dancing: “We bounce, we hop, we twirl, we groove –/ the music makes our bodies move.” The sounding of
a gong, whose vibrations are shown gradually diminishing to silence, eventually
ends a concert filled with a multiplicity of melodies, leaving the bats to
return to their roost at dawn with a new realization: “Heading for home, we hum
or we sing,/ and discover there’s music in everything.”
(Again, that last word needs to be in four syllables for the line to scan – a
note for metrical purists.) The delights of Lies’ books about humanlike bats in
unlikely locations – beach, library, ballpark – are many, and the celebratory
mood of this latest entry fits beautifully into the series.

The celebration is a
seasonal one, but the amusement is for anytime in Charley Harper’s A Partridge in a Pear Tree, which takes the
familiar carol about the gifts of the 12 days of Christmas and adds some gentle
commentary to a series of drawings created by Harper (1922-2007) not originally
for publication but for his own family to enjoy. Now other families can delight
in them , too: pastel sketches of the various, increasingly elaborate gifts are
accompanied by the well-known text of the song, with just a line added here and
there. The initial partridge in a pear tree gets the parenthetical comment,
“(He always gives me something unusual.)” As the birds, which Harper
differentiates beautifully and with his usual ability to encapsulate a
creature’s essence in just a few lines and shapes, begin to mount in number,
the recipient comments, “(My place began to look like an aviary.)” Eventually
there are swans swimming in the bathtub, one French hen is re-gifted, the cow
for the maids a-milking has to be tied up outside, and by the time the nine
pipers piping arrive, gaily bedecked in alternating red and green outfits, “(I
began to wish I’d never heard of Christmas.)” A neighbor calls the police
because of the noise the drummers make, the leaping lords “knocked over the
Christmas tree and frightened the cat,” and eventually the entire house is
shown simply crammed with the evidence of the giver’s enormous, if misplaced,
generosity. And this leads to an absolutely marvelous conclusion that sets just
the right tone of acceptance, love and humor: “On the first day after
Christmas, I, carrying on though daunted,/ Called the zoo, a hotel, and my
love,/ And said, ‘You dear! Just what I wanted!’” Anyone who does not laugh at
that ending needs a heaping helping of Christmas spirit – and had better start
developing it in midsummer to be sure there is enough of it before December 25.
Charley Harper’s A Partridge in a Pear
Tree is, or should be, a book for all seasons.

M.J. McGrath is really
hitting her stride in the third and best of her mystery stories featuring Inuit
hunter, guide and reluctant detective Edie Kiglatuk. Both Edie and the
supporting cast emerge as more fully human, better-developed characters in The Bone Seeker than in White Heat and The Boy in the Snow, and the largest character of all – the remote
High Arctic setting – is more thoroughly plumbed and is a fuller participant in
the action this time. As before, the region is a source of bitter cold, of
multiple kinds of ice (each with its own dangers), and of the rich Inuit
history in which all the books are steeped – a history that McGrath cleverly
connects with southern readers (meaning anyone from Alaska on down the map) by
having Edie herself be half Inuit and half qalunaat
(meaning southerner or non-Inuit; her father’s desertion of the family when
Edie was a child thus stands for qalunaat
neglect of or unconcern for all things Inuit). But here there is more: the
distant Arctic is a staging ground, chosen for its extreme remoteness, for
now-decaying observation posts left over from the Cold War, for modern-day
military training and maneuvers, and maybe for something so dangerous and
shadowy that secretive arms of the Canadian and U.S. governments will to go
frightening lengths to conceal its existence.

The government-conspiracy
angle could easily drift into cliché, and in fact has some weaknesses that
almost cause the book’s otherwise tight plotting to unravel: a too-dedicated
investigating lawyer from Guatemala who is “disappeared” in a
less-than-believable scene, and a change of heart from a character that is
crucial to the wrapup of the plot but is quite unrealistic in context and never
satisfactorily explained. Nevertheless, the Cold War overlay is what makes The Bone Seeker more than a murder
mystery – it begins as one but soon,
as Edie and her associates seek the killer, starts to have resonance that reaches
well beyond the killing of one of the girl students that Edie teaches in the
remote hamlet of Autisaq. That resonance comes from the past, or rather from
two different pasts: that of the southerners who have long exploited the Arctic
for their own political and military purposes and that of the Inuit, for whom
the past lives side-by-side with the present in a land where bones do not decay
and remnants of history may reappear anytime as the ice shifts unpredictably.

This is not the first time McGrath has
explored the ways in which these two pasts intersect in Edie’s life and the
life of those around her. For example, White
Heat refers to the contamination of Arctic sea life by PCBs whose source
may have been “Russian nuclear plants [or] wartime radar stations [or] U.S.
naval submarines.” But McGrath pulls the elements of this story together with a
surer hand than she has shown before. The difficult and crotchety Inuit elders,
long a thorn in Edie’s side, are crucial to the plot of The Bone Seeker, and the old Inuit beliefs and superstitions turn
out to have completely germane connections both to the murder and to the
mysteries of the Arctic’s military past and present. The way in which McGrath
ties together Inuit reproductive difficulties and government indifference to
Cold War policy effects makes this book far more tightly knit than the previous
two, and far more chilling in ways that go beyond the bleakness (to southern
eyes) of the landscape in which the events play out. The fact that The Bone Seeker is loosely based on real
events may be one thing that gives it particular resonance, but it is McGrath’s
growing skill at showing Edie and the other fictional characters as real human
beings – whose actions are intimately connected with their personalities rather
than dictated by the exigencies of the plot – that really gives this novel its
impact.

The Bone Seeker contains passing references to events of the two
prior Edie Kiglatuk novels, and it does help to have read them in order to have
a full appreciation of what happens here – Edie’s attitude toward alcohol, for
instance, after her abuse of it (a common problem among the Inuit) ruined her
marriage and nearly destroyed her life, as well as her feelings toward her ex’s
son, Willa, in light of what happened to Willa’s brother, Joe, in White Heat. However, it is perfectly
possible to read and understand The Bone
Seeker without being familiar with the prior books – and given the skill
with which McGrath handles matters here, this novel may be a better entry to
the series than either prior one. Readers who start here are very likely to
want to go back to the earlier Edie Kiglatuk books to gain additional
perspective, much as Edie herself finds that she must delve into the past, hers
and the Arctic’s, to solve intertwined mysteries whose tragic consequences are
personal and intimate and wide-ranging and far-reaching, all at the same time.

Choosing Raw: Making Raw Foods
Part of the Way You Eat. By Gena Hamshaw. Da Capo. $19.99.

Does This Plug into That?
Simplify Your Electronic Life. By Eric Taub. Andrews McMeel. $19.99.

As life continues to get
more complicated – which seems to occur every day, if not every hour – books
that can simplify it are more welcome than ever. Nutritionist Gena Hamshaw’s Choosing Raw is intended to simplify decision-making
for people who want to include more raw foods in their diets – without being
fanatical about it. That is a welcome approach: Hamshaw says forthrightly that
she is “not a raw foodist” and therefore does not insist only on “foods that
haven’t been heated above a certain temperature (105°-115°).” She
likes stir-fries, roasted vegetables and cooked grains, and at times eats less
than 75% raw food – especially when traveling or eating out. Hamshaw thus makes
an unusually sensible guide to one of those approaches to food that can all too
easily descend into perfectionism and fanaticism. “I want you to approach raw
foods as a choice,” she writes, adding that there are two basic reasons for
making that choice: health, “the ways in which plant foods might benefit your
body and help to protect you from chronic disease,” and compassion, “respect
for our animal neighbors and an effort to tread lightly on mother earth.” This
will still be too New Age-y and touchy-feely for many readers, but it is at
least within the realm of possibility that people wondering what is involved in
increasing their intake of raw food will be willing to listen to Hamshaw’s
comparatively reasonable advocacy – although it is worth pointing out that she
is a dedicated vegan and says that “animal rights are the defining feature of
my relationship with veganism.” In any case, it is possible, and for non-vegans
even desirable, to skip over Hamshaw’s opening advocacy chapters and start to explore
one’s interest in raw foods in the chapters featuring “Frequently Asked Questions”
and “Myths and Misconceptions.” The latter, for example, says it is a myth that
vegan diets are expensive and hard to maintain – “veganism is what you make of
it.” The issue of “raw diet” and “vegan diet” tends to blur and blend as the
book goes on, but at least Hamshaw often makes comments such as, “This section
will help you ease into vegan and raw foods,” repeatedly reminding readers that
they are two (somewhat) separate things and that her purpose is to help
non-vegan, non-raw-food eaters explore vegan and raw diets and (she hopes)
convert to them. The practical side of this involves explaining what foods and
ingredients to have on hand at all times (from agave nectar, amaranth and
avocado oil to young Thai coconut); how to plan meals 21 days at a time; and
what recipes to try – there are 125 of them here, from “basic massaged kale
salad” and “no-bake sunflower oat bars” to “toasted pumpkin granola with
homemade hemp milk” and “heat-free lentil and walnut tacos,” and many more.
Hamshaw arranges recipes in three levels, from easiest to most challenging, so
readers who want to experiment with raw and vegan foods can start with some
simpler dishes and move into more-complex ones if they wish. What they will or
will not wish will be entirely a personal matter: Hamshaw’s “tread lightly”
arguments are unlikely to convince anyone not already supporting them, and her
health-related ones, although reasonably solid, are by no means universally
accepted. But for people already thinking about eating more raw foods – for
whatever reason – Choosing Raw can be
a reasonable place to get more information on how, if not why, to move into the
raw-food arena.

And speaking of simplicity:
whatever you choose to eat, it is likely that you choose to use a considerable
amount of technology. Maybe “choose” is not even the right word: food types are
a choice, but technology use is much less so (even the famously technologically
averse Amish are now usingcell phones).
Technology consultant Eric Taub offers to simplify everyone’s tech life in his
short (170-page), easy-to-read Does This
Plug into That? And he does in fact labor mightily to clarify and simplify,
although he is hampered by a couple of things. One is that technology changes
so quickly that some elements of his book are already outdated, and others will
soon be. Another is that Taub has a distinct point of view that is not revealed
unless you enjoy reading notes (it is the very first note, but on page 165):
“If you want an unbiased guide to
consumer electronics, this is not the book. I have many opinions (e.g., that
Apple’s products are generally better than the competition’s) gleaned over
years of writing about technology.” Well, that certainly limits the book’s
usefulness. To cite just one example: Apple’s business model involves getting
users of its equipment to stampede to stores and replace every iteration of
technology with a newer one every year or two – cletely ignoring the
environmental impact of discarding so much perfectly good technology for
technology that is often only marginally better, and sometimes not even that.
And another part of the business model involves locking Apple users into
proprietary, carefully managed, tightly controlled Apple-only offerings, from
apps to power cords – stifling competition and allowing Apple to jack up prices
and boost its profits. There is nothing wrong with any of this – a company’s
strategy is its provenance, and there are plenty of alternatives for people who
do not like it. But Taub’s admitted bias prevents him from even discussing
these downsides of Apple products – and that can be a significant negative for
people who are already confused enough by technology to need Does This Plug into That? That caveat aside – and it is a big one, but
not big enough to invalidate much of what Taub says – the book has a lot of
solid, basic information that can be helpful to anyone who finds modern
technology at best confusing, at worst genuinely burdensome. For example, he
explains what Dolby Digital and DTS are; why speaker bars work, and how they
can be placed in the front of a room to simulate sounds as if they come from
all around; why plasma televisions are better than LCD sets for viewing in
normally lit rooms; how to find things on your computer (separate instructions
for Macs and PCs running Windows 7 or 8); how to set up a DVR; why you may not
want to give up your landline for a cell phone; how to call overseas
inexpensively; why you might want a tablet – and why you might not; and much
more. The book is a grab-bag, and because it is one, it omits some major
technology issues. For instance, in discussing tablets, Taub looks exclusively
at their pluses and minuses for consuming information (watching movies and TV
while traveling is one plus; comparative lack of software is one minus). But
Taub never deals with doing anything creative,
such as writing papers or reports – something that is far harder on tablets
than on traditional computers. This is a major negative for anyone who, whether
traveling or not, needs or wants to make some sort of contribution to the
information flow; yet it passes unnoticed in Does This Plug into That? Still, there is enough plain-spokenness
here, about enough subjects, with enough specificity, to make the book valuable
– at least as a starting point – for people who simply feel overwhelmed by computers,
printers, TVs, cell phones and other ubiquitous examples of our increasingly
technological society.

Mendelssohn’s two piano
concertos neatly encapsulate both the enormous talent of the composer and the
reasons he was, in the past, held in less esteem than he is today. No. 1 is
absolutely splendid, filled with beauty, virtuosity and a sense of rhythmic and
harmonic daring that sweeps the listener along from start to finish and leaves
him or her wanting more. No. 2 is more considered, more carefully assembled,
every bit as well-thought-through – but lacking a certain spark of sheer
ebullience for which its greater maturity of purpose never quite compensates.
The two concertos’ lengths allowed them easily to fit on a single vinyl record,
so they were often paired at that time; and in the CD era, they tend to be offered
together as well. But it is quite difficult for even the best pianists to
handle them the same way without losing something in the process. In two new
recordings of the works, both of them first-rate in terms of the skill of the
soloists, Christian Chamorel’s is the more successful because it offers No. 2
as an entirely different work from No. 1, not in any way a continuation or
attempt to recapture the verve of the earlier concerto. Alon Goldstein’s
version, while also very well and effectively played, makes No. 2 into
something of a pale successor – which many in the 19th century
thought Mendelssohn’s later music to be in general (hence the lower level of
appreciation of him as a composer at the time). Goldstein’s performance, with
the Israel Chamber Orchestra under Yoav Talmi providing strong and committed
backup, was recorded live in March 2013, and it has some of the involvement and
intensity of a good live performance – but also some of the excesses, such as
overuse of rubato, for example in the
piano entry in the finale of No. 1. The tempos here are well-chosen and the
interplay between soloist and orchestra is well managed, as is the balance
between piano and ensemble. Goldstein handles the youthful fervor of No. 1 with
considerable élan, but No. 2 is more earthbound: the notes are all there, but
the work’s spirit is rather thin, as if the pianist himself does not care for
it as much as the earlier concerto. The performance is fine, but it never
really catches fire. The concertos are offered on this Centaur CD with
Mendelssohn’s First Symphony – like both concertos, a minor-key work – and this
gets a strong reading from Talmi, although a less emotionally satisfying one in
the Andante than it sometimes receives.
As an encore, the orchestra offers the Scherzo
from the utterly delightful Octet, Op. 20
– a movement orchestrated by Mendelssohn himself and used by him in the première of the First Symphony instead of
the Menuetto, which the composer
restored when the symphony was published.The delicacy of the movement comes through in this recording just as
well as it does in the music’s chamber version, with the CD as a whole
showcasing the tunefulness and beautiful balance that are characteristic of
Mendelssohn’s music, particularly the earlier pieces.

Chamorel’s handling of the
concertos is perhaps more mature, perhaps simply more considered. It is
fascinating to hear how different these works can sound even when performers
take them at essentially the same tempo: the difference between Chamorel’s No.
1 and Goldstein’s is less than 40 seconds, the difference in No. 2 a mere 12
seconds. Chamorel’s First Concerto is just as fiery and extravagantly youthful
as Goldstein’s, with Chamorel paying even more attention to the con fuoco indication in the first
movement while using rubato more
judiciously in the finale (although still a bit too much). No. 2 shows the
different approaches even more clearly. Chamorel gives the concerto expansiveness
that it lacks in Goldstein’s version, allowing the first movement to flow more
broadly and the second to emphasize its molto
sostenuto marking clearly – even though Chamorel’s reading is almost a
minute faster than Goldstein’s. Chamorel gets excellent backup throughout from
Orchestre de Chambre Fribourgeois under Laurent Gendre: the ensemble’s suppleness
and adaptability match the pianist’s. And Chamorel’s handling of the solo-piano
pieces that fill out the CD is exceptional: he treats each of the Songs without Words as a perfectly
formed miniature with strong emotional import, and gives the Variations Sérieuses a reading
that balances structure and emotional content to fine effect. Fondamenta
provides top-notch sound and a very unusual bonus called a “Mobility CD” that
is designed to be played on computers, in cars and on other sound systems with
audio characteristics noticeably different from those for which the primary
“Fidelity CD” is made.

It was Schumann who was
largely responsible for the high regard in which Mendelssohn was held in his
own lifetime, Schumann who deemed Mendelssohn the Mozart of the 19th
century (a somewhat back-handed compliment, since Schumann then noted that if
there is another Mozart, there must also be another Beethoven out there).
Mendelssohn in turn was a strong advocate of Schumann’s music. The composers’
pieces have many affinities as well as differences, and Lisa de la Salle’s
excellent performance on Naïve of three very different Schumann solo-piano
works is a fine complement to Chamorel’s handling of some of Mendelssohn’s. De
la Salle is a sensitive and highly nuanced performer. She casts a spell of
wistfulness over Kinderszenen while
neatly encapsulating the individual pieces, so different from Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words but just as personal
in their own way. The Abegg-Variationen,
Schumann’s Op. 1, get a sturdy, solid reading that contrasts interestingly with
Chamorel’s handling of Mendelssohn’s Variations
Sérieuses. And the Fantasie,
Op. 17, is expansive and involving, with strong flow within and between its
sections, as de la Salle manages to connect the strongly emotional first and
third movements with the more-martial second, giving each its own characteristic
flow while uniting the three into a work of both strength and expressiveness.
The connection of this piece with Mendelssohn is quite clear, not so much in
the music as in the circumstances of its composition: both it and the Variations Sérieuses were
contributed to a fund appeal for a monument to be erected to Beethoven in his
birthplace, Bonn. As different as the works’ scale and effects are, this point
of similarity shows yet another way in which Mendelssohn and Schumann were
connected in their lifetimes.

Many years later, in the 21st
century, Michael J. Evans has turned directly to Mendelssohn for inspiration in
ways both musical and extra-musical. Cipher
is an interestingly odd construction that spends an hour using both
Mendelssohn’s words and a theme from one of his Songs without Words to explore the different communicative
potential of verbiage and music. The original words are spoken, then given in
13 translations – they are transferred between English and other languages and
then back – and then, in the 14th variation, they fade into the
musical theme, which is subjected to 24 variations and then becomes the basis
of an extended final fugue. The pianism required of Karolina Rojahn here is
quite different from that needed to perform Mendelssohn or Schumann, but it has
roots in the same need to bring out both formal structure and emotional content
– the latter being more important in Cipher.
The difficulty in this (+++) Navona release is that Evans’ intellectual
exploration of the abstraction of music as a more-effective communicator than
the specificity of language is somewhat abstruse and not particularly
involving, especially in the overuse of words in the first five minutes or so
of the work. It is never entirely clear how the variations on the words and
those on the musical theme relate to each other – that is, it is clear
philosophically, but not by simply listening to Cipher, which has a fascinating intent that does not quite come off
in the execution, despite Rojahn’s sensitive playing.

Evans is scarcely alone in
wanting to explore the relative efficacy of music and words, the psychological
connection between what music is and
what it communicates to listeners. On
another (+++) Navona CD, this one entitled Rational
Passions, Greg Bowers looks into exactly the same subject. Rojahn is the pianist
here, too, in Perception Etudes, a
nine-movement suite whose weighty intention is to explore ways in which
audience, performer and the music itself combine to produce the musical experience.
Somehow it seems wholly appropriate that the final movement is called
“Confusion,” although the work is not so much confused as rather unfocused.
Clearer, at least in strictly musical terms, is String Quartet No. 2—By-Products of Mass Media, whose three
movements all try to come to terms with aspects of pop culture: rave music,
channel surfing and the online world. The Boston String Quartet (Christopher
Vuk and Angel Valchinov, violins; Chen Lin, viola; Christina Stripling, cello)
gamely essays a work whose sounds wander around and about without ever settling
on any specific meaning – which may be Bowers’ point but can leave listeners
feeling somewhat dislocated. Also here are an intellectual exercise and an
emotional one: Gestalt Figures
(played by Vuk and Stripling with pianist Keun Young Sun) tries to suggest
composer-listener connections by showing musically how the parts of a work are
used to assemble a sense of the whole; the exercise in toto is about as dry as its description. Eurydice Returns, on the other hand, is a psychologically oriented
approach to the Orpheus myth that never quite evokes the drama or pathos of the
story, which at its heart is as much about music as about love. The title of
this CD is an accurate one in showing what Bowers is trying to do, which is
analogous to what Evans seeks with Mendelssohn as a springboard. The issue with
the Bowers disc is that its cerebral approach requires an explanatory framework
that never allows the emotional content of the music – to the extent that it
has any – to shine through. The result is pieces to be ingested rather than
experienced.